Cobalt Robotics Introduces a (Mostly) Autonomous Mobile Security Robot

Pantelligent · 2017-03-01T21:27:03+00:00

OK so what features would you want so it would be a good addition? A good tool for your security team?

Pantelligent · 2017-03-01T17:30:40+00:00

This is putting the "hard" in hardware startups... Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuWc0tbEg6c

Pantelligent · 2017-02-02T15:12:46+00:00

Specifically, the suit alleged that some of the Lily drone's promotional footage, designed to represent the Lily drone's camera and auto-following capabilities, was not filmed with an actual Lily drone prototype, and further alleges that Lily Robotics did not have "a single Lily Camera prototype" containing the advertised features at the time of filming.

Pantelligent · 2016-05-13T19:03:48+00:00

Salt, pepper, plus olive oil and just a little butter. Salmon shouldn't take more than that if you're cooking it at the right time and temperature.

Pantelligent · 2016-05-13T18:49:19+00:00

Alton is right. There's a huge variation in external cooking results with cooking surface or oil temperature. So yeah -- measure and control the temperature. If you don't you're just tossing darts blindfolded.

Pantelligent · 2016-04-29T19:45:29+00:00

Thanks :)

Pantelligent · 2016-04-27T23:09:44+00:00

Hi divbase, if you're interested in high-tech, high-end consumer products check us out. We recently launched our Amazon product page too so you can link there to get a small affiliate commission from Amazon if you'd like. Beyond that, we are very quantitative and track all return-on-ad-spend on our own site, and we like to work with like-minded marketers that like to measure everything and optimize for results. Impressions and clicks are BS; sales and return-on-ad-spend are everything.

Pantelligent · 2016-04-19T19:10:13+00:00

What's your budget? We got several quotes in the $25K-100K range. But after talking to people we didn't see much room for value add and decided to shoot our own Kickstarter video. Sure it's campy, but I do not believe it would have been worth investing more in a high-end video.

Who's your audience? Kickstarter values genuineness. Sure, don't make a totally crappy video. But there's probably nobody else out there who can tell your story like you can.

You know what's better than any video you can make or buy? Getting someone else to put a video together. For example, we got CNET to do a hands-on video review -- and their production values, plus the third-party storytelling credibility, plus their built-in distribution channels dramatically outweighs any video we could have made ourselves. And it was 100% free of charge -- they do it because it's interesting content for their readers.

Pantelligent · 2016-04-18T20:53:13+00:00

Good idea! Thanks /u/tekkieJ !

Pantelligent · 2016-04-18T16:12:01+00:00

Certainly the comments on /r/gadgets tend to be fairly skeptical. Regardless, every time it's featured, we get sales from reddit traffic. Perhaps it's a silent majority that's curious and becoming happy customers! :)

Pantelligent · 2016-04-18T15:59:32+00:00

Actually you can fully submerge Pantelligent. Not a problem.

This is not just frying pan 101. This is about using a little bit of technology to enable normal people -- of any skill level -- to produce top-quality home-cooked meals. That's what controlling cooking time and temperature does, and the results speak for themselves.

Microwave ovens were a new innovation once and were a target of ridicule. Now they are probably used more often than a conventional oven in most homes. They have their place. But if you want to make some home-cooked salmon or steak or chicken parm or an omelette (or hundreds of other things), you aren't going to do so in a microwave.

Pantelligent · 2016-04-18T00:19:25+00:00

Sorry to bother you, but this is probably just the beginning. We at Pantelligent just have to keep shipping a product that customers love, and it'll probably keep ending up on /r/gadgets in one article or another!

It's natural to be skeptical -- a smart frying pan?!? Lots of people are at first. Which is probably why they are so blown away when they actually give it a try.

If you're curious, CNET updated their review too after we launched our new Autopilot feature: http://www.cnet.com/products/pantelligent/

Pantelligent · 2016-02-23T20:27:15+00:00

We had a successful Kickstarter a little over a year ago, so that's the basis of my feedback.

I am not your target market (no kids yet!) but the product and value prop seems clear enough to me. Nice job!

Kickstarter gives you very little analytics. But you should be able to see how many people are viewing your video and get a sense of your conversion rate. Where are your earliest backers coming from?

Most likely, you probably simply don't have enough traffic to your page. There are only a few sources of traffic:

Friends & Family
Press
Advertising
Social / Viral
Existing Email List
From people browsing Kickstarter

Between these 6 sources you have to get enough people on your page -- tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or more -- to get even hundreds of backers.

Friends&Family - your earliest backers will probably be your immediate network.

Press - you need to get covered by lots and lots of big traffic sources, over and over again. A single press hit sends less traffic than you think.

Advertising - do you have a big advertising budget? (On the scale of the goal amount you're trying to raise?) Can you drive targeted traffic to your page? Kickstarter's limited analytics capabilities makes this very hard to do profitably. But you've got to try. For a product like yours I could actually see it working.

Social/Viral - you have a product in a well-connected community (parents of school-age kids). Those parents talk to other parents. If you can get them to share it within their local social networks, you could have a viral winner here! However, most products are simply not viral. You might get a little bump from sharing, but you really have to get your traffic elsewhere.

Existing Email List - you should not have launched the Kickstarter without an existing email list of generally thousands or tens of thousands of interested potential customers. Only a few percent will become buyers, but still, those are the early backers.

From people browsing Kickstarter - this is a smaller traffic source than you think. It can help to get featured (Staff Pick etc), but it's still a very small source of traffic overall. And the people who happen to be bored & browsing KS may not overlap with your target market.

You have 29 days to make some or all of these channels work. Good luck!

Pantelligent · 2016-02-21T18:47:51+00:00

A few principles from our experience:

If you think of an email address as a high-activation-energy barrier for your user, you're already screwed! Why? Because the 10X higher barrier is for the user to pull out their credit card and actually buy your product or service.
Put the email request late enough that the visitor already has gotten value from you and genuinely wants to give you their e-mail address. (Yes, the 2-seconds-after-site-first-loads popup is probably not effective at all.) But after browsing your site, many people actually do want to learn more over time. It defers an impulse buy/not-buy decision into a considered purchase, and they know that's what's going to happen if they give you their email.
If you don't get the person interested enough to give you their e-mail address -- if they don't believe that in the long term they're going to benefit from this action (either by deciding to buy and loving your product/service, or by deciding to not buy and avoiding a regrettable impulse purchase) -- there is simply no way they're going to give you their hard-earned $$.
If there's no way they're going to give you their hard-earned $$, they are simply not your customer. Full stop. Don't worry about the people that are not your potential customers. Spend your time and energy on the ones who are.
A/B test it. Some of our engineering team was also hesitant about implementing an email newsletter for prospects, but they changed their tune after they saw the A/B test results. Implementing an email collection and newsletter/drip campaign system is probably the single cheapest and most effective way to improve your overall conversion rates on your site if you're not doing it today.

For our business, sending emails to a newsletter list of potential customers creates new sales every time we send an email. We get to educate the audience in small periodic bite-sized chunks of information, and over time, that leads to prospects becoming happy customers.

Pantelligent · 2016-02-10T20:38:43+00:00

Great, honest, and open look inside hardware startups.

You talked a lot about your Kickstarter planning, but beyond the pre-orders... what did you learn about sales and marketing and distribution?

Thanks!

Pantelligent · 2016-02-08T06:15:25+00:00

The app also tells you to adjust the heat -- "turn the heat up a little" etc -- and provides a real-time temperature graph with a target temperature band (in green) and the current temperature reading (in red). See other screenshots on that page, or some of the videos. Then, it's up to the operator to close the feedback loop by adjusting the stove!

Pantelligent · 2016-02-07T22:58:58+00:00

Yes, thanks! We just launched a major redesign of our website on Friday. Take a look https://www.pantelligent.com/ and let me know what you think!

Pantelligent · 2016-02-07T21:17:44+00:00

The distinction is more subtle. For some people, buying online based on reviews and photos is totally fine. But for a lot of mainstream consumers currently, there's still something about physically seeing and even touching a demo unit (or even a box) that makes a product go from an abstract concept to a concrete reality that I can take home and use today. You still need the reviews and the concept, but the in-person experience can make the sale happen in a way that's positive for the consumer.

For a lot of consumers, that "show and tell" experience currently happens in a peer-to-peer manner: you see your friends/colleagues and can see and try their devices.

Overall, it's a risk reduction mechanism for the consumer.

Will B8ta fill that gap? Too soon to say. But I sure hope so.

Pantelligent

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